Often he engaged in Koan-like expressions
that puzzled and amused his listeners. He saw beauty in strangeness
and actively sought it out.

He declared,

"If you haven't found something
strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."

Wheeler divided his
own life into three parts.

The first
part he called "Everything
is Particles"

The second
part was "Everything
is Fields"

The
third part, which Wheeler considered the bedrock of his
physical theory, he called "Everything
is Information"

EVERYTHING IS PARTICLES

John Archilald
Wheeler was born on July 9, 1911, in Jacksonville, Florida, into a
family of librarians.

At 16, he won a scholarship to Johns Hopkins
University. He graduated five years later with a Ph.D in physics. A
year later he got engaged to Janette Hegner.

They stayed married for
72 years.

Source Unknown

In 1933 in an
application for the National Research Council Fellowship to go to
Copenhagen and work with Neils Bohr, Wheeler wrote:

"I want to go to work with Neils
Bohr because he sees further than any man alive."

Bohr and Wheeler
published their first paper in the late 1930s, explaining nuclear
fission in terms of quantum physics.

They argued that the atomic
nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, is like a drop of liquid,
which starts vibrating and elongating into a peanut shape when a
neutron emitted from another disintegrating nucleus collides with
it.

Wheeler
considered it his duty to help with the war effort, but the atomic
bomb wasn't ready in time to end the war and save his beloved
brother, who died in Italy in 1944.

After the war
ended, Wheeler returned to Princeton and taught Einstein's general
theory of relativity, which at a time was not considered a "respectable" field of physics.

Wheeler's classes were exciting
- one of his tricks was to write on chalkboards with both hands.

He
frequently took his students to Albert Einstein's house in Princeton
for discussions over a cup of tea.

EVERYTHING IS
FIELDS

Wheeler co-wrote
the most influential textbook on general relativity with Charles W. Misner and
Kip Thorne.

It was called Gravitation.

While working on
mathematical extensions to the theory, Wheeler described
hypothetical "tunnels" in space-time
which he called "wormholes". He was not the first scientist to think
of the possibility of wormholes, or even black holes, but he
established the idea.

In this regard, it's worth noting that
Democritus, an ancient Greek philosopher, suggested that matter was
composed of atoms, which was "mainstreamed" by John Dalton's
discovery of atoms 2000 years later.

In 1784, John Mitchell, a
Yorkshire clergyman, suggested that light was subject to the force
of gravity long before Einstein proved it.

After the
publication of the theory of General Relativity in 1916, in which
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of black holes, in 1967 John
Wheeler named them.

This claim was
considered rather outlandish until his thought experiment, known as
the "delayed-choice experiment," was tested in a laboratory in 1984.

This experiment was a variation on the famous
"double-slit
experiment" in which the dual nature of light was exposed (depending
on how the experiment was measured and observed, the light behaved
like a particle - a photon - or like a
wave).

Unlike the original
"double-slit
experiment", in Wheeler's version, the method of
detection was changed AFTER a photon had passed the double slit. The
experiment showed that the path of the photon was not fixed until
the physicists made their measurements.

The results of this
experiment, as well as another conducted in 2007, proved what
Wheeler had always suspected - observers' consciousness is required
to bring the universe into existence.

This means that a pre-life
Earth would have existed in an undetermined state, and a pre-life
universe could only exist retroactively.

A
UNIVERSE 'FINE-TUNED' FOR LIFE

These conclusions
lead many scientists to speculate that the universe is fine-tuned
for life.

This is how Wheeler's Princeton colleague,
Robert Dicke,
explained the existence of our universe:

Let's hope that
young scientists will continue to be encouraged by these words and
will push the boundaries of human imagination beyond its limits, and
maybe even find the elusive final theory -
a Theory of Everything...